Revolutionary protest rarely begins as democratic or revolutionary. Instead, it grows in a process of positive feedback, incorporating new constituencies and generating new demands. If protest is not revolutionary at its onset, theory should reflect this and be able to explain the endogenous emergence of democratic demands. In this article, I combine multiple data sources on the 2010–2011 Tunisian Revolution, including survey data, an original event catalogue, and field interviews. I show that the correlates of protest occurrence and participation change significantly during the uprising. Using the Tunisian case as a theory-building exercise, I argue that the formation of protest coalitions is essential, rather than incidental, to democratic revolution.

One of my pet peeves when watching televised sports is when the commentators declare that one or another player or team “has momentum” or that “the momentum has shifted.” Typically, this statement is made shortly after a team or player does something that puts them in a better position to win the game, and the implication seems to be that this change in momentum will carry someone to victory. But there are at least two problems with this all-too-typical sportscaster pronouncement. One is that “momentum” is a mathematically well-defined notion in physics, where it means the mass of an object multiplied by its velocity; linear momentum is also a vector quantity, and has both a magnitude and a direction. It is this complexity that allows momentum and changes in momentum—in conjunction with an account of the various forces at work on the object—to explain the object’s trajectory. A well-kicked football has momentum in the physics sense, but it is quite unclear how the “momentum” of a player or a team might be calculated, to say nothing of the various forces at work on the player or team’s movement through the playing of a game. Hence both the determination of a player or team’s “momentum,” and the use of that “momentum” in explaining or predicting the outcome of a game, necessarily remain at the level of metaphor.

We describe an emerging research practice that we call Large-N Qualitative Analysis (LNQA), outline its core components and codify best practice. LNQA starts with hypothesized regularities and causal mechanisms. Regularities take two basic forms: Y generalizations (if Y then X) or X generalizations (if X then Y), albeit with more complex variants. To establish a causal generalization requires defining its scope. The strength of the regularity is simply the percentage of cases conforming with the causal claim. The causal force of LNQA, however, comes from within-case causal inference, which demonstrates the presence and operation of the postulated mechanisms in all cases in the scope. The method thus partly obviates problems arising from case selection in qualitative and multimethod work. We also identify a multimethod variant (M-LNQA), which combines LNQA with experimental, quasi-experimental, or observational statistical analysis. An appendix introduces over fifty examples of the method.

Since the third wave of democratization, specialized constitutional courts have spread widely across developed and developing countries and become key to government accountability, rights protection, and cross-institutional conflict resolution. Simultaneously, nearly half of all constitutional court adoptions have occurred in Europe. What explains the global, yet Eurocentric, spread of constitutional courts? Countries’ institutional endowments, particularly domestic and international legal institutions, are key to this crucial choice of constitutional design. Common law countries are less likely to establish specialized constitutional courts than their civil law counterparts due to their domestic legal system’s relatively weaker affinity with the constitutional court model. Furthermore, the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission—the main international organization specifically promoting constitutional courts—has catalyzed their wide and rapid spread especially, but not exclusively, in Europe. Our theory gains robust support from event history analyses of 172 developed and developing countries from 1947 to 2019.

The political implications of population aging for democratic systems are fundamental. Questions of democratic legitimacy are raised as the political equilibrium between the generations is upended. Drawing on evidence from liberal democracies with a focus on Japan, the democracy with the oldest electorate, we identify and analyze three demographic effects on the political system: participation effects deriving from younger voters’ marginalization among the electorate; representation effects demonstrated by the dominance of elderly lawmakers inside the parliament and government; and policy effects manifesting in a preference for policies catering to an aging majority. By breaking down these key effects and contextualizing them in broader debates of political demography, we call attention to the normative repercussions of the interplay between demography and democracy and make a case for enhanced generational pluralism.

Women face more harassment and intimidation as politicians than men, but little is known about how this affects representation. I develop a theoretical framework for studying the gendered costs of political violence for descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation. Testing the framework using interview and survey data on Swedish women and men politicians, I uncover the costs of violence against politicians in all three dimensions empirically. Violence makes women more frequently than men consider leaving politics and enforces male-coded characteristics for political candidates, affecting prospects for gender-diverse descriptive representation. Substantive representation is harmed by violence silencing feminist debates and obstructing women politicians’ policy debate activities. Women’s symbolic representation is threatened by violence coercing women to decrease their visibility.

As the pandemic accelerated calls to provide relief to millions of student borrowers, President Biden announced executive action to cancel $10,000 of student debt for most federal student loan holders. Both prior to and following his announcement, policymakers have debated the merits and details of student debt relief, focusing particular attention on the perceived deservingness of student loan borrowers. But we have little systematic evidence about how the public evaluates borrower deservingness, or whether elite arguments framing support or opposition to debt relief in terms of deservingness influence public preferences for student debt cancellation. We employ original conjoint and framing experiments conducted just prior to Biden’s announcement to explore each query. We find that, while certain borrower characteristics indicating need (e.g., amount of debt), responsibility for debt (e.g., type of institution attended), and reciprocity (e.g., time in repayment) can influence people’s evaluations of whether borrowers deserve debt relief, those results may not translate to broader deservingness arguments for or against student debt cancellation in a clear manner. Ultimately, our results shed light on a timely policy issue, while extending scholarly understandings of deservingness for a critical and understudied aspect of the American welfare state.

A core tenet of representation is that individuals should expect government to actively protect their human security. In the issue area of domestic violence in the United States, government largely fails to do this for women, who comprise three-quarters of all victims of domestic violence. Nowhere is this more apparent than for Native American women living on tribal lands. In terms of lifetime physical violence, nearly 52% of Native American women will be physically abused compared to 30.5% of white women, 41.2% of African American women, and 29.7% of Hispanic women (Crepelle 2020; Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2023). One of the main obstacles to keeping Native American women safer is that tribal nations have been functionally prohibited from prosecuting non-Native offenders of violence against Native Americans on their lands. Non-Native offenders comprise the bulk of domestic violence abusers in these communities. To address this inequity, the 2013 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) created Special Domestic Violence Criminal Jurisdictions (SDVCJs). Through an application process, federally recognized tribal nations can create these jurisdictions to provide justice for the many women who are victims of domestic violence at the hands of non-Native persons. In this article we explore which tribal nations created these jurisdictions using an original dataset of the 354 tribal nations that were eligible to adopt an SDVCJ following the 2013 VAWA reauthorization. As of 2022, 31 tribal nations have adopted SDVCJs across 13 states, which have led to 74 domestic violence convictions. In this article, we explain adoption of these courts as a function of population, tribal nation fiscal capacity, federal grant support, and having an existing self-governance compact with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

In any healthy democracy, myriad policy issues compete for the public’s attention. Most remain on the periphery of politics, either because they achieve salience only in narrow communities of interest or because they grab headlines only for brief periods of time. But sometimes issues become what we term “durable attention items”—they capture public attention and sustain it over many years. Why? We focus on one such newly durable issue—gun control in the United States. Using an original dataset of roughly 4,500 letters to the editor over a 40-year period, we demonstrate that this once-episodic issue, long dominated by a narrow constituency of pro-gun advocates, has become a mainstay of mass politics. We show that the gun issue’s growing agenda status is due entirely to pro-regulation people mobilized by a combination of contextual factors, namely regularized mass shootings and efforts to relax gun policy, working in tandem with partisan polarization. Besides offering novel evidence of a fundamental shift in American gun politics, the study contributes to our theoretical understanding of how episodic issues come to command consistent political engagement over the long term.

Over the past fifteen years, a narrative has developed that IR scholars have become a “cult of the irrelevant,” with declining influence on and engagement with policy debates. Despite these assertions, the evidence for limited policy engagement has been anecdotal. We investigate the extent of policy engagement—the ways in which IR scholars participate in policy-making processes and/or attempt to shape those processes—by surveying IR scholars directly about their engagement activities. We find policy engagement is pervasive among IR scholars. We draw on theories of credit-claiming to motivate expectations about how and when scholars are likely to engage with practitioners. Consistent with our expectations, much of this engagement comes in forms that involve small time commitments and provide opportunities for credit-claiming, such as media appearances and short-form, bylined op-eds and blog posts. However, sizable minorities report engaging in consulting activities not for attribution/publication and writing policy briefs, and a majority of respondents indicate they engaged in these activities several times a year or more. We find only small differences in engagement across gender and rank. Our results demonstrate that, for IR scholars, some form of policy engagement is the norm.

Despite their long-held reputation as controlled affairs, autocratic elections continue to surprise. Recent years have seen turnovers in power or unexpected opposition gains in such far-flung places as Guinea-Bissau, Venezuela, Malaysia, and Bhutan. Of course, in many other dictatorships, ruling parties resoundingly win their elections and only increase their aura of dominance. Yet even when turnover is unlikely, elections can loom over autocratic politics like a squall line on the horizon. For instance, many observers claim that Putin’s planned reelection in 2024 makes him less willing to accept defeat in Ukraine. How do we make sense of the inner workings and surprising outcomes of these elections?

Many of the conversations about international cybersecurity have remained siloed in specific disciplines and professional cultures. As such, there is disagreement among academics and practitioners about how to define basic terms, such as “cybersecurity,” and arguments about what should “count” as part of cybersecurity. Because people’s perspectives on cybersecurity are often defined by where they “sit” professionally, practitioners and scholars are sometimes unaware that they do not share a conceptual universe. For instance, many separate international internet governance debates from conversations around global cybersecurity norms, although many of the same cleavages and barriers to agreements occur in both domains. Others consider censorship to be unrelated to cybersecurity, although espionage via hacking uses many of the same tools as the domestic surveillance that goes hand in hand with censorship. Still others do or do not incorporate considerations of internet infrastructure into conversations about conflict in spite of concerns about the security of undersea cables to most global powers. The three books under review—James Shires’s The Politics of Cybersecurity in the Middle East, Florian Egloff’s Semi-State Actors in Cybersecurity, and Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall’s Four Internets: Data, Geopolitics, and the Governance of Cyberspace—all help us understand how to think about this landscape. Each untangles some of these disconnects by making assumptions transparent, articulating places of overlap, unpacking terminology and categories, and offering paths forward for scholars.

Political attempts to control how the past may be represented have flourished in the twenty-first century. Russia participates in this trend, having taken steps to legislatively and juridically safeguard the legacy of the USSR’s involvement in World War II. This has institutionalized an interpretation of the fight against Nazism that was already widely held in society, making the Russian case a “hard test” for evaluating when the violation of a historical norm is deemed appropriate and what the impact of a memory law might be relative to other factors. Drawing on two vignette experiments conducted in 2021, our article demonstrates both that the discursive context in which a controversial statement about the past is made matters when respondents assess whether the person making it should be punished and that criticism of a historical norm is more likely to be accepted when it emanates from an in-group member. We also find that the state has limited ability to influence societal attitudes regarding history. Moreover, a willingness to defend state-led interventions into how the past is depicted aligns with support for the political system but the latter does not necessarily overlap with individuals’ historical views, underscoring the multidimensional nature of collective memory.

Recent decades have seen a precipitous decline in union membership, with deleterious consequences for the working class. Yet political theorists have devoted little attention to unions. In this article, I argue that unions help solve collective action problems that otherwise stymie workers’ attempts to take industrial action and compel employers to take better account of their interests. Unions thereby afford workers a form of partial protection from domination. This has three important implications. First, insofar as workers have claims against subjection to domination, they must be afforded opportunities to unionize. Second, insofar as the ability of unions to afford workers such protection depends on their being able to credibly threaten industrial action, it is essential that unions and their members have the right to take such action. Finally, workers have duties to join the union that represents them and contribute to its legitimate activities. This lends support to various forms of compulsory unionization.

There are two opposed views on the proper relationship between academic research and political activism. The first argues that academics who study politics must remain objective, hence precluding activism. The second argues that academics can and should also be political activists, hence precluding scholarly objectivity. This article argues against an assumption shared by these otherwise opposing positions: that activism and objectivity are incompatible. It conceptually identifies and then normatively defends a form of objectivity characterized by active engagement with evidence that is what Max Weber calls “inconvenient” for one’s existing beliefs and commitments. Far from being incompatible with political activism, this form of objectivity is essential to its success. Since scholars, activists, and scholar-activists alike would all benefit from active engagement with inconvenient evidence, I conclude that academic institutions should promote this form of objectivity among both activist and non-activist scholars, while political organizations should promote the same virtue among both academic and non-academic activists.

Immigration and growing diversity have been linked with pathologies such as lower social capital, the rise of authoritarian populists, intergroup conflict, and perhaps the breakdown of democracy itself. At the heart of this complex is a question relating to migration and political culture: whether immigration erodes the attitudes that sustain and legitimize democratic political systems. This paper takes a time-series, cross-sectional approach to this question by analyzing the effects of a comprehensive set of measures of immigration on dynamic estimates of trust in democratic institutions, satisfaction with democracy, and democratic support from 30 European countries. The results show that immigration does not undermine any of these forms of public support for political systems. Indeed, under some circumstances, immigration may increase public trust in democratic institutions.

Structural realists accuse U.S. economic engagement with China as a mistake driven by liberal idealism and lack of realism. I suggest that this increasingly popular narrative reflecting the traditional idealism-realism distinction is misplaced. First, liberal approaches to international relations can clash with each other when a democratic state engages with an authoritarian state, and engagement is justified by one strand of liberalism—economic interdependence liberalism—whereas a different liberal perspective—democratic peace liberalism—opposes economic engagement with an oppressive regime. Second, realism—in particular, structural realism—posits that important state behaviors reflect the need to attain more relative power than others. Then, if economic engagement better serves a state’s relative capacity vis-à-vis other states, economic exchanges with a potential strategic contender would be an unavoidable choice. The liberal case for economic engagement is much more restrictive than it is often articulated, while a structural realist case for engagement can be convincingly made. For about two decades since the mid-1990s, U.S. administrations defended economic engagement with China not only with economic interdependence liberalism but also by utilizing an argument in line with the structural realist case for engagement. Blaming one foreign policy idea as responsible for today’s strategic difficulties is misleading.

Despite the common assumption that ethnography is most successful where researchers achieve recognition as insiders within the communities they study, conducting research in nondemocracies inverts incentives to conduct ethnographic research as an insider and poses unexpected ethical risks to both researchers and respondents. Rather than increasing trust and facilitating access, cultivating insider roles in nondemocracies may have the unintended effects of encouraging conformity with regime discourses, limiting further fieldwork access, and exacerbating respondents’ tendency toward epistemic deference. Drawing on the authors’ research experiences and the growing literature on fieldwork in nondemocracies, this article argues that outsider roles may be preferable to insider roles for identifying the unspoken rules, assumptions, and taken-for-granted aspects of everyday politics in nondemocracies. Moreover, outsider roles clarify the relationship between researcher and respondent in ways that provide clear ethical advantages in terms of consent, value, and risk.

Scholars have expressed concern over waning support for democracy worldwide. But what do ordinary citizens mean by the term “democracy," and how do their definitions of democracy influence their support for it? Using global cross-national survey data, this study demonstrates that individual variation in the understanding of democracy is substantively linked to democratic support across countries and regime contexts. Individuals who define democracy in terms of elections and the protection of civil liberties and those with greater conceptual complexity express higher support for democracy. This relationship between democratic conceptualization and support holds across diverse political contexts and alternative explanations. These results suggest that it is essential to consider divergent conceptualizations of democracy—and how they may vary systematically—when analyzing popular opinions of democracy.

This article examines how Indian anticolonialists drew on Darwinism and evolutionary theory to resist British imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival material from The Bengalee (and beyond), I show how Indian nationalists marshaled evolutionist schemas to contest stage-based accounts of social advancement rationalizing despotic rule in India. I argue that Darwinian evolutionism enabled anticolonialists to respond to a particular decolonial dilemma—that of developmentalism, the unilinear notion of historical time justifying India’s political subjection. While Darwinism’s social application is commonly understood to sustain imperialism, I demonstrate that it served, in the colonial context, to deconstruct historicist tropes portraying India as politically immature. Drawing on evolutionism, nationalists contested the presumptions of imperialist discourse and reconceptualized progress in novel, anticolonial terms. Darwin’s travel to India thus exposes a distinctive decolonial quandary, the syncretic Indian anticolonial response to it, and the intractability of the contradictions facing decolonizing movements globally.